Ordered Lists

Grrrr!!!!!!

I was finishing up a web page to discover that the W3C in all their great wisdom deprecated the start element for ordered lists. Since it is impossible to know the beginning element of an ordered list at design time (when I wrote the linked style sheet), I am forced either to have an embedded stylesheet in the document or convert all of the lists to tables. The document worked so well with ordered lists. Basically, since I was talking about natural numbers, I wanted to begin the list at zero rather than 1.

I really hate the W3C. Personally, I think the ideal design for a style sheet language would be to only deprecate those tags which are defined at design time (such as fonts, background color), and to leave the tags that are used at run time to add meaning to a document. For example the strike tag was extremely useful to show editing information. The person who wrote the stylesheet would have no idea what text the editors remove or change in a document. The style sheet designer could not possibly know the start element for an ordered list. Likewise, the style sheet designer could not know if an image added in text is left or right aligned.

Speaking of design tags. The W3C gets rid of the helpful start attribute in ordered lists and they get rid of the aligh tag for inline images, but they require that images have a width and height attribute. Last I looked, width and height are design elements.